“Whale Fall” director Brian Duffield is well aware that most of the time, it’s a bit of a shocker for the main character to be swallowed by an animal.
“Typically, it feels like the end of a movie,” Duffield told Variety with a big smile. “It’s like, ‘Rest in peace, Austin!'”
But the team at Disney’s 20th Century Studios felt “bullish” on using the intense first 15 minutes of the adventure thriller, in which a scuba diver (Austin Abrams) searching for the remains of his father (Josh Brolin) is swallowed whole by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale, to tease what’s to come.
“Disney felt like this was such a crazy scene and it was going to happen so early in the movie that they got a little bullish and said, ‘Yeah, let’s show them how the movie starts and let them figure out where it goes from there,'” Duffield said of the film’s official trailer, which was released on Tuesday.
“It’s going to be a very claustrophobic movie, but we’re also pretty big!” Duffield says of the film, which opens in theaters on October 16th, “There’s a lot of spectacle, sometimes in surprising ways. It’s like I’ve never seen a movie set in the places where so much of this movie takes place.”
Choosing to center the entire movie around a sperm whale wasn’t just for the catchy log line. The filmmakers did their homework to make the hungry whale, the largest toothed predator with the rare (and almost theoretical) power of killing with sound, look and sound as realistic as possible. Duffield researched Daniel Krauss’ 2023 book Whalefall, on which the film is based, and worked with whale experts to understand the science.
“It became interesting, like, ‘How do you tell other animals in the ocean that Austin is aware that he’s in the stomach? And what does it do in the stomach?'” he says. “We have different built-in languages, and our stomachs react differently depending on the type of animal reading it.”
“Whalefall” is a thrill ride, but Duffield insists it’s more than a simple monster movie. In fact, he says, “This whale is just as much a victim of Austen in this experience.”
One of the missions of storytelling is to make the audience truly fall in love with this animal. “The whale isn’t the bad guy. It doesn’t realize it’s swallowing Austin. It’s trying to swallow its lunch, and Austin is just a byproduct of that,” Duffield said. “I wanted it to feel less like a monster movie and more like Austen was inside a living animal. There’s something scary about it, but there’s also something beautiful about it.”
Austin Abrams (Jay Gardiner) in “Whalefall.”
20th Century Studio.
All underwater scenes were shot in an aquarium built at the Radford Studio Center in Studio City, California.
“We all knew it was a very difficult set-piece and we did everything we could to make it as safe as possible, but also intuitive and exciting,” Duffield says. “When you look at this, you can really see the hard work everyone has put in.”
For that matter, Abrams performed most of the stunts himself, although there are scenes in the film that feature stuntmen and CGI.
“We don’t have to force anything on Austin to make the movie better,” Duffield says. “As soon as we were cast, he started learning how to dive and got used to it all. We never had a conversation. If anything, the only time we really got into arguments was when he wanted to go too far.”
That’s when he and stunt coordinator Shauna Duggins intervened and applied the brakes. “If I were you, I’d say, ‘You’re going to die! I can’t let you do this!'” But he was convicted of the same thing we were all convicted of: Audiences go to movies for an experience. ”
Austin Abrams (Jay Gardiner) in “Whalefall.”
Jennifer Klassen/20th Century Studio
Josh Brolin (Mitt Gardiner) in “Whalefall.”
20th Century Studio.
Director Duffield compares the claustrophobic setting of Whalefall to the UFO scenes in Knope, but says he doesn’t take much inspiration from other disaster movies. Most films in this genre feature a character with the expertise to get out of a life-or-death situation, but what makes Whalefall interesting is that the protagonist has no idea what he’s getting himself into.
“Austin is still a teenage boy. He’s really unequipped, he hasn’t had any training, so we kind of talked about, ‘Well, this is what’s going on. All you have to do is scream!'” Duffield says. “There’s no pretending, no ‘training starts.’ Once you realize where you are, you just go crazy, melt down and start crying like a baby.”
Whalefall, which opens in theaters on October 16th, will be shown in 4DX with motion-enabled chairs, senses, and smells. The film is still in post-production, so the exact experience is still being designed, but the filmmakers are looking forward to seeing how the immersive theatrical experience will make being inside a sperm whale even more terrifying.
“I literally learned more about it in six hours,” Duffield said. “I’m really interested in how anxiety-provoking this process is, because just the casual movement of a whale swimming adds quite a bit of fear. Essentially, you’re constantly reminded that you’re inside a living God.”
Watch the trailer below.
